Fintech Unicorn Stripe Gains a $22 Billion Valuation

After
a year of sending the flagship cryptocurrency a letter, the Silicon
Valley fintech has reportedly achieved a staggering $22.5 billion
valuation. This
was followed
by a $100 million investment from Tiger Global Management. That is
calculated to a nearly 13
percent increase from the firm’s previous $20 billion valuations.
Stripe received this
following a Tiger Global-led funding in 2018 for $245 million.

A
stripe spokesperson said, “Stripe is rapidly scaling
internationally, as well as extending our platform into issuing,
global fraud prevention, and physical stores with Stripe Terminal,
”in an emailed statement. “The follow-on funding gives us more
leverage in these strategic areas.”

One
of the areas that are
no longer a part of Stripe’s strategic plan is the bitcoin
payments.

Stripe
in 2014 became the first significant payment processor to add an
option for bitcoin. It removed that functionality last year, blaming
the time it takes for transaction confirmation is very slow and
collection of high fees for a substantial decrease in the number of
merchants accepting crypto payments.

When
Stripe announced the breakup with Bitcoin, Tom Karlo former Stripe
product manager said, “Over the past year or two, as block size
limits have been reached,
Bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than
being a means of exchange. Given the overall success that the Bitcoin
community has achieved, it’s hard to quibble with the decisions
that have been made
along the way. And we’re certainly happy to see any novel, and
ambitious project do so well.”

After a few months later, Claire Hughes Johnson the
Stripe COO made a comment that suggested the breakup was less than
amicable.

“The
killer app for Bitcoin out there today is ransomware,” she said at
the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, “I do think we’ve reached
that jump the shark moment where you just say ‘da-da-da
blockchain.” Replying to this Karlo said that “We may add support
for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use
continues to grow.”

Till date Stripe’s decision to leave out crypto
payments doesn’t seem to have hurt its bottom line. And based on a
specific report, it has been ranked as the world’s most valuable
fintech unicorn, and along with this enhanced valuation, the firm is
pushed even further into the lead.

Its notable US competitor is cryptocurrency exchange
Coinbase, which has achieved an $8 billion valuation. Coinbase is
ranked third globally, trailing $10 billion behind the India-based
startup One97 Communications.

FinanceMain tracks every single details of global finance industry and provides to readers with in-depth analysis and accurate data. We are leading source of latest news updates of finance, business, economy, trade, technology and more. Our writers bring latest news updates to our readers to help them to stay updated with current market trends.